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Chapter 9 Business Intelligence Systems
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Figure 9-26
Microsoft.com Main Page Less
than 2 Hours After Surface
Announcement
Source: © Access 2013, Microsoft
Corporation

after its announcement of Surface. We can only wonder how many other pages on Microsoft.com
needed to be changed within those 2 hours.
Finally, content is provided in many languages. 3M has tens of thousands of products, some
of which are harmful when used improperly. 3M must publish product safety data for all such
products in all the languages shown. Every document, in whatever language it was authored,
must be translated into all languages before it can be published on 3M’s site. And when one of
them changes, all of the translated versions must change as well.

What Are Content Management Application Alternatives?
Three common alternatives for content management applications are:

• In-house custom
• Off-the-shelf
• Public search engine

In the past, organizations developed their own in-house content management applications. A
customer support department, for example, might develop in-house database applications to track
customer problems and their resolution. Operations might develop an in-house system to track
machine maintenance procedures. Like all custom applications, however, custom content man-
agement applications are expensive to develop and maintain. Unless the domain of the content
management is crucial to the organization’s strategy and no off-the-shelf solution is available,
most organizations today choose not to support a custom CMS application.
Because of the expense of custom applications, many organizations today use off-the-shelf
software. Horizontal market products like Microsoft SharePoint provide generalized facilities to
manage documents and other content types. Some organizations choose vertical market off-
the-shelf applications. An accounting firm, for example, may license a vertical market applica-
tion to manage document flow for the processing of tax returns or the management of audit
documents.
Such off-the-shelf products have considerably more functionality than most in-house sys-
tems, and they are far less expensive to maintain. Keep in mind, however, that organizations
need to develop data structures and procedures for managing their content; they also need to
train users.
Some organizations just rely on Internet search engines, such as Google or Bing, to manage
their content. Because these engines search through all public sites of all organizations, they are
usually the fastest and easiest way to find public documents, even within the organization. It may